Yo Unregistered: Join us for the April 1 meeting when it will be Recovery night. We will have demonstrations working with winching, recovery and spotting. We will meet at 7:30 p.m. at Jefferson County Fairgrounds (not Stevinson Toyota but nearby).

Actually in testing Windows 7, the techs here have found very few issues. It really is better, and encapsulates legacy programs in a VM-like XP environment. Or so it was told me. We will probably go from XP Pro direct to 7. On what ain't Linux anyway.

Windows Vista... not so much. It was responsible, however, for significant sales of XP and XP Pro however.

I had a friend who had a shrinkwrapped box of Windows 286 (prior to 3.10). Best kept that way. Amusingly unstable according to him. Probably will be worth a mint someday.

OBTW, I found the Dell at home would not boot for my wife yesterday. Did a nice job of making the on/off switch blink yellow though, indicating a power issue. Dang. Hadn't even gotten around to putting in the new motherboard.

Called Dell about the power supply issue, to go along with the motherboard issue. The fella wanted me to go ahead and install the replacement motherboard they sent me. Ooooookay... I was kinda thinking I would preserve it from a miscreant power supply, but I took the time to do it.

Pretty cool heatsink for the processor. I think you 40 guys could solve some overheating issues with it.

Now it does nothing at all. No blinking power switch, nuttin'.

The Dell tech will come to my home Friday or Monday, power supply and motherboard in hand. Gratis.
I'll let him screw around with it this time.

The problem with 3.1 was it was nearly impossible to write a Windowing application with a 16-bit OS. Just not enough addressable memory space. The gyrations programmers had to go through were incredible. Plus, one stray memory reference (bug) could bring the whole thing down because of an extremely outdated memory model. All this while 32-bit parts with onboard MMUs had been out for a decade.

Macs were just humming along with a 32-bit OS and nice clean API. Virtual process spaces and apps were no longer bringing the whole system down.

Win95 brought a 32-bit OS and emulated in a VM the 16-bit apps. Very important for Microsoft to bridge that chasm. And to earn the Win95 sticker, software had to be written to the new 32-bit API. And so it went, the empire was saved.

The real horror was that progress was severely retarded those 10 years while h/w was not being utilized and robust apps were just a pipe dream.